Mic Wright is a journalist specialising in technology, music and popular culture. He lives in Dublin.

Idiots who rely on Apple Maps to navigate deserve to get lost

The actual location of Mildura (purple pin) is more than 40 miles from where Apple places it (red pin).

No fewer than six motorists headed for the city of Mildura in Australia have had to be rescued by the police in the last month after finding themselves stranded in inhospitable terrain. At least one spent 24 hours without food or water. Who's to blame? Why Apple, of course. A major mistake in the company's blighted Maps app puts the city not where it should be but 40 miles away in the middle of the Murray-Sunset National Park. The police warning about the "potentially life-threatening" risk of using Apple's mapping solution in the area has produced plenty of news stories justifiably lampooning the firm but these extreme examples just illustrate one thing: some of us are too reliant on our smartphones.

Before the ubiquity of smartphones, sat-navs were the stars of tales where drivers ended up stuck underneath low bridges or driving into rivers after blindly following the instructions from their disembodied co-pilots. There's a class of technology user that is all to ready to switch on their gadgets and turn off their brains. In the case of the motorists misled by Apple's directions to Mildura, they will have had to leave well-established roads and ignore the total lack of road signs pointing to their destination to drive deep into the national park. Their faith in their iPhones defies logic and what their own eyes should have been telling them.

That blind acceptance that a smartphone is smart enough to conquer any journey has infected the peaks of Britain too. In August, the Cairngorm Mountain Rescue Team reported that 16 people had to be helped off the hills in one week alone after relying on their phones as their main means of navigation. Sales of Ordnance Survey Maps dropped by 25 or cent between 2005 and 2011. It's no coincidence that over the same period, Mountain Rescue call outs in England and Wales rose by 52 per cent. The number of walkers relying on their smartphone to commune with the gods of GPS is frightening.

There's no denying that Apple failing to pinpoint the location of a city with a population of 30,000 is ludicrous – but to rely solely on your phone to find your way is almost equally foolish. The failures of Maps in iOS 6 made me realise just how much I'd come to rely on Google Maps on my phone. I’ve now reacquainted myself with old-fashioned means of making my way around. Yes, I still use my smartphone to navigate, but not without a paper map as backup and keeping a close eye on the signs and landmarks around me. What was missing in the case of the misled Mildura motorists was common sense and no company, not even Google or Apple, can give you that.